Cannot contact SharePoint Administration service (spadminV4)

In your travels through SharePointLand, specifically SP2010 when using PowerShell, you may come across the following error:

Exception calling “Deploy” with “0” argument(s): “This operation uses the SharePoint Administration service (spadminV4), which could not be contacted. If the service is stopped or disabled, start it and try the operation again.

It’s a simple error message and, unusually, the clue is in the error.

It’s likely you are trying to run PowerShell commands on a server in your SharePoint farm that is not running the Central Administration service. Switch to a server in the farm running Central Admin and you should be golden.

Wood for the trees, again.

(Here is the error message again without the quotes for search engines: Exception calling Deploy with 0 argument(s): This operation uses the SharePoint Administration service (spadminV4), which could not be contacted. If the service is stopped or disabled, start it and try the operation again.)

2 Comments

Michael jackson
on March 19, 2013 at 7:53 pm

well in my case I got that error when I was on the correct server and the service is in fact running. So the error is completely un-helpful. Any suggestions then?

Just in case anyone else ends up here with the same problem that Michael Jackson and I were having and Seb’s comment doesn’t help; there was a network trust issue going on for me so leaving and rejoining the domain on both TFS and SQL servers and repairing the TFS installation resolved the error mentioned.